In There Will Be Dragons, John Ringo invents a delightfully preposterous world. Thanks to breakthroughs in nanotechnology, energy production and control, and artificial intelligence, all mediated by the technological descendant of today’s Internet and overseen by a nearly omniscient, nearly omnipotent AI named “Mother”, mankind lives in a near utopia. Every person can do pretty much what he or she wants to do and live how he or she wants to live. There’s plenty of food, plenty of energy, and plenty of time–most people live to be over three-hundred years old. There’s no government to speak of; all that remains is the Council, a small body that oversees the operations of the Net.

Want to be a dolphin? Go for it! Want to fly? There are personal devices that will allow that. Want to fly like a bird, with your own wings? You can do that too. Want to spend a century studying genetics, or blacksmithing, or the Roman Legions? Feel free. Almost anything is possible.

Some things we’re familiar with have been made impossible. Explosions are prohibited at the molecular level; if something is made to explode, Mother quietly siphons the energy away. Bombs don’t work. Firearms don’t work. Steam engines don’t work. But nobody misses them, so it’s no big deal.

Then one day there’s a split in the council, and one faction uses violence to try to take control of the Net. The opposing faction responds, and quickly each faction is using all of the energy reserves available to it to destroy the other. Normal citizens have a limit on how much energy they can draw; council-members do not. In short order, all of the energy normally used to transport food, to power houses and appliances, to suspend thrill seekers high in the air, is withdrawn. Mother is programmed to preserve herself and her functions, but otherwise not to interfere if her charges go to war; so Mother goes on, and the constraints she places on the world (such as the ban on explosions) go on, but there is literally no power available for anyone else but Mother and the council-members.

Civilization crashes overnight; indeed, many people perish in the first minutes of the war. The rest struggle to rebuild, forming communities primarily around groups of reenactors–folks who, like our Society for Creative Anachronism, get their kicks learning primitive skills and living without all of the modern conveniences. In this crisis, they are the only ones who have the skills needed to survive. And with centuries of experience, some of them are a darn sight better at it than their medieval ancestors.

At least, that’s what the good guys do. The evil faction on the Council captured control of slightly more energy than the good faction, and they’ve dealt with their civilian population in a different way: by “Changing” refugees into the kind of people they need: slow, stolid, hardworking farmers–or big, hulking, angry warriors. Orcs, in a word.

What Ringo has done is create a high-tech, science-fictional (if thoroughly preposterous) background for writing heroic fantasy. There are a very few wizards with miraculous powers–the council-members. The available weapons are low-tech: swords, spears, bows and arrows. There are dragons, elves, dwarves, merfolk, and intelligent dolphins–and, now, orcs–all created through the miracle of biotechnology.

This first book in Ringo’s “Council Wars” series sets everything up for the initial crash, and describes the efforts of one particular community to rebuild and then defend itself. The second book, Emerald Sea carries the story forward; and here’s where Ringo really begins to enjoy himself.

It seems that the “good” faction on the council, the faction with which our heroes are aligned, has managed to gain control of most of the Americas. The “bad” faction has its stronghold in Europe. The bad guys (and they are most certainly bad guys) want to invade North America; but they haven’t enough of an energy edge over the good guys to transport their orcs to America from Europe by pre-collapse means. That means they’ll need to use low-tech, which is to say, sailing ships. The good guys realize this, and they intend to prevent it. Being low-tech doesn’t mean you can’t innovate; and there are some serious history buffs on the good side.

In the 20th century, air power was the key to control of the sea. Our heroes don’t have airplanes; but they’ve got a number of dragons; and a bunch of wyverns trained (indeed, created) to be ridden by trained dragonriders. So how do you carry these dragons and wyverns to where they’ll be useful in an ocean battle? Enter the sail-powered dragon-carrier….

As Jane would say, Ringo had far too much fun writing this book; it’s evident in every chapter, and in fact Ringo says much the same in an author’s note at the end. It’s glorious fun, although thoroughly preposterous; and the presence of a certain chaotic rabbit is almost worth the price of admission all by itself. I’m looking forward to the next book.